The Royal Cinema and Inside Out present: Gregg Araki's TEENAGE APOCALYPSE TRILOGY

Friday, August 31st - Saturday, September 1st The Royal Cinema is teaming up with Inside Out LGBT Film Festival to present Gregg Araki's beloved 90s cult flick trio, THE TEENAGE APOCALYPSE TRILOGY!

Beginning with THE DOOM GENERATION through to TOTALLY F***ED UP and NOWHERE, join us in celebrating Araki's radical contributions to the queer cinema canon. Plus, we have prizes from our lovely sponsors, The Beguiling Books & Art & Eyesore Cinema!

Individual tickets are $12 online, $14 door or $30 to see all three films! Please note triple bill pricing is only available online.

THE DOOM GENERATIONFriday, August 318pm

"The second part of his ‘teenage apocalypse trilogy’, Gregg Araki’s killer road movie boasted a self-penned script brimming with pop culture references and acidic political satire, while the characters’ (and America’s) cisgendered view was ruthlessly unravelled and challenged in a collision of visual reality and hyperreality.

Audiences walked out of screenings at Sundance, appalled by the expletive-strewn, alliterative dialogue, the apathy of self-obsessed Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), Jordan White (James Duval) and Xavier Red (Johnathan Schaech), and floored by the violence and sex in soulless, arid, neon-washed landscapes. The censors slashed 11 minutes to leave its gruesome ending in tatters. McGowan’s father threatened to kill Araki, and critics loudly loved or loathed it, their reviews calling it out on its bad taste and absurdity or applauding its audacity and nods to Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic, Bande à Part.

Twenty years later, The Doom Generation is one of the few 90s teen movies to remain watchably relevant as well as stylistically impressive. Its oft-overlooked dark humour is still sharp, while the spiky themes of intolerance and alienation feel more timely than ever"- Dazed Digital

"Gregg Araki once described TOTALLY F***ED UP, his follow-up to the 1992 New Queer Cinema staple The Living End, as a “rag-tag story of fag-and-dyke teen underground…a kind of cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick.” The statement attests not only to Araki’s committed radicalism, but also to his sense of how the politics of pop culture play to alienated youth. Araki’s Brat Packers, far ruder and more vociferous than Hughes’s, are a rainbow batch of teens muddling through the triple-whammy of adolescence, boredom, and uncloseted homosexuality in an unmellowed Los Angeles.

The endings of the director’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (of which TOTALLY F***ED UP is the first part) may seem utterly desolating, yet they all move toward a rejection of negativism in favor of the harsh but inescapable complexities of the world. Life is fucked up, Araki is saying, but it is worth living."- Slant

NOWHERESaturday, September 18pm

"Concluding Araki’s “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” NOWHERE was initially criticized for being nihilistic, vulgar and vacuous. It is the least discussed film of the cult trio. Featuring gratuitous sex, disturbing violence, drug use and a bleak ending that would make Kafka come in his pants, NOWHERE is outlandishly stylish, absurd and provocative – yet substance is not sacrificed. The film slyly satirizes the teen movie genre itself and our insatiable hunger for love while also scrutinizing celebrity obsession and the commodification of spirituality.

NOWHERE focuses on the sensitive and naïve Dark (James Duval) as he struggles with the disillusionment, sexual awakening/confusion and pressures of adolescence. An aspiring filmmaker who carries his camcorder wherever he goes, Dark is morbid, melodramatic and detached. “Sometimes I feel so old-fashioned, from another planet,” Dark laments, endearing himself to the angst-ridden outcast that I was. Never before had I identified so strongly with a character on screen. Dark’s loneliness and uncertainty reflected my own. Even though the film ends with Dark hopeless and bloody, I felt assured that I was not alone."- Talkhouse

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RSVP FOR ACCESSIBLE SEATING:We have 5 accessible sections in our theatre which you can reserve ahead of time by calling 416-466-4400 ext 0. One of our accessible seating areas has space for two mobility devices and a small section behind for the party to join. The other three are for single mobile devices with 2-3 seats beside it.

Please note that we do not have accessible washrooms. All of our washrooms are upstairs.

The Royal Cinema wishes to acknowledge the Haudenosaunee and the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the original keepers of this land, for hosting us. Today, the meeting place of Tkaronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and present in this territory.